fortune favors

Karma
gets all the headlines, grabs
the credit for touchdowns, nabs all the praise
for raising the dead, bringing down fire
on bad neighborhoods, striking disobedient children
with leukemia, seeing to it that every young woman
asking for it gets hers. That jerk you hate,
for what he did: a car accident, maybe. It's
in the mail, oh for sure it is. Cancer of the heart.
Karma rarely misses, and never, ever swerves.
Victims get theirs for what they did. Every part
of the whole picture is in focus, karma
is always zeroing in on a long, curved orbit
at double light speed towards ground zero with impact
projected at ninety degrees from cosmic, transcendent
distances, a trajectory to ruin some bad human being
but good. Karma sees to, and is doing it
all for you - don't you worry about this.

It's out of your hands, the verdict is
guilty as hell and you can't resist, twist free,
wriggle or squeeze out from under its spell. Every worst
last thing on the slate, coming true - is all because
of some other bad thing that you did,
or will do.

Karma gets it. The credit,
and the necessity for there to be any credit.
The desperate necessity of a mechanism
to make us sure, of everything
pinned in its fixed balance, where it all makes sense:

A playing with fire, for every one burned.
One lie from a liar, for every scorched pair
of pants. A circle of protection around
every circumstance, with the date it comes due
scrawled on thin air, in permanent clear, and a card
with some poor shmuck's name
on a line filled in, for every dance.

And you know, sure, we know
- just us? That we never
deserved all that. Our one chance -

And what just happened to it!
Well, shit! For that to happen to us -
when we cared and deserved
so much - !

what a sad,
and impossible run of bad luck